Angeline Lester

Angeline Lester was born about 1847 on the Womble plantation near Lumpkin, Stewart County, Georgia. When she was about four, her family was broken up: her father was sold to a doctor near Brooksville, and Angeline, her mother and a younger sister were sold to John Grimes. He gave them to his newly married daughter, and they were taken to a plantation near Benevolence in Randolph County. During the war they were turned over to Robert Smith, who served in the Confederate army in place of their enslaver. News of the war was kept from them.

After the war there was a celebration in Benevolence, where she said she tasted roasted meat for the first time. The next Sunday they were told they were free. They could stay for wages, or leave with only the clothes on their backs, and since they got just one pair of shoes and two dresses a year, that wasn't much. Soon after, her father came and gathered the family, and they worked for wages for different employers.

She married John Lester and outlived him. In 1937 she lived alone in a former store at 836 West Federal Street in Youngstown, Ohio, and devoted herself to what she called working for the Lord, in New Castle, Pennsylvania, Akron and Youngstown. When her picture was taken and she learned it might go to Washington, she said that if she'd known, she would have fixed herself up a bit.